Steering magnets at some of the larger accelerators generate fields are so strong that if one were standing next to one when fully energized during operations it would strip the iron out of your blood cells.

I asked my buddy at LBL about this, and if he was working on the LHC, here is his response:

"Hey Dan -
I am not actually working on the LHC though about half of my group is
and I get to share in the excitement and enthusiasm and I know a lot
about it. Everyone is pretty stoked, some of them have been worknig on
this project for half of their careers.
Whoever says that you can pull the iron out of your blood has been
watching too many x-men movies. it just doesnt work that way. your
bullshit detector is in fine working shape. Iron bound in Hemoglobin
is not ferromagnetic."

gyre wrote:Do you really think so?Where did they get a magnet that big?

I often see extremely faulty methodology on that show.Once they proved something was true and then said it was a myth!!!

What did they do?

MRI.. not sure if they did anything else aside from the MRI and doctor/lab tech interview before subjecting their tatoo'd worker to the risk of death.

I have noticed one or two things not tested the way I would have. Like exploding cars.. the one time I got to see it I didn't recall seein tracers used. I always had thought that a tracer was a sure way to make a gas tank go boom. I haven't come across the episode since to pay closer attention. Either way I'm sure some experimentation could yield a round to do the deed. It was their movie myth episode I believe.

Anyway I digress..

Tats are safe in MRIs as the inks dont have metal and the old ink is not sufficient in metal to be a worry.

I think the issue only relates to non-standard tattoos done with ferrous material, such as prison or overseas ink.
I don't know what occurs in those cases.

Mythbusters setups are often very flawed, failing to even address the right question.
I have seen few of them.
I didn't see the one about fuel tanks.
It is hard to make an auto gas tank explode or even catch fire, though a leak is likely to cause a secondary fire with a car with cats.

At one defensive driving class they routinely fire a shot into the car to show that one need not panic with shots fired.
Once they did it at the end of class and the car exploded.
I don't know if they changed the practice after that, but they had done it for years without a fire.

[url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/11/14/scisurf114.xml]Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything[/url]
The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.

He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.

The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.

But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: "The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in."

And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: "Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I'd love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot."